Tourism and Trade Nexus in Africa: A Gravity Model Approach

The tourism industry is now an important economic sector in Africa. However, as with trade, Africa’s global share of the tourism industry is quite small, which could be attributed to a similarly low level of both intra-regional trade and tourism. Prevailing data and studies suggest that there is a relationship between tourism and trade. The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the empirical link between tourism and exports in Africa for the period 2006 to 2015. We estimate a structural gravity model using the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimator that allows for bilateral zero trade values between trading partners, controls for heteroskedasticity and addresses the potential endogeneity. We find that a 10 percent increase in intra-African tourism boosts the continental exports by between 1.4 and 3.2 percent. These results strongly posit that boosting regional tourism could be instrumental in catalysing intra-African trade, especially within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).